Film Review | Money Monster

Write it off

by Thomas Delapa

Looking for a hot insider tip on Money Monster?

Then save your eight bucks. This George Clooney/Julia Roberts Wall Street suspense satire is flat, warmed-over road kill.

While two-time Best Actress Oscar winner Jodie Foster uneasily returns to the director’s chair for her fourth feature, she strands her under-performing stars in what adds up (or down) to a low-caliber shotgun merger between Dog Day Afternoon, Network and The China Syndrome. Unless Foster has her own hedge fund, she shouldn’t look for career dividends any time soon.

Nobody yells “Attica! Attica!” or “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” out the window, but Foster’s scriptwriters borrow from so many topical 1970s dramas that they must be paying a monster interest rate. For starters, he-e-e-re’s Lee Gates (Clooney) the slick, smarmy host of a cable-TV financials show, a man so vacuously fatuous that you know he’s a sure bet for a coast-to-coast comeuppance. Next up is uninvited surprise guest Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell), a Queens palooka who’s, yes, mad as hell at the damn rich since he lost his life savings on one of Gates’ bum stock tips. Standing tall, very tall, behind them is Roberts’ Patty Fenn, the show’s sharp, super-cool, alpha-female producer and Foster’s moral conscience in the vast wasteland of 24-7 tabloid TV.

Reunited from their cash-cow Ocean’s Eleven reboots, Clooney and Roberts slowly sink carrying the star ballast, though they can hardly shoulder all the blame. If Clooney once had promise as a cheeky Hollywood throwback to the likes of Clark Gable, he’s now so annoyingly mannered (cocking his head for every emphatic line), that by now his performances are all reruns. If Foster got a bum tip from her agent before buying into this project, she doesn’t do her leads any favors either, inflating the story with overwrought acting and a manic shooting style that papers over the yawning holes in the story’s junk-bond rated logic.

The net result is a cheap, remote-controlled financial thriller that chews up and spits out every populist cliché this side of Oliver Stone and Bernie Sanders. Not a few minutes into Gates’ “Money Monster” daily show, Budwell crashes the set, armed with handgun, made-for-TV hysteria, and an explosive vest designed with the now-cowering host in mind. With the whole world watching—absurdly, even in distant Iceland and Korea—Budwell shouts his million-dollar hostage demands, profanely punctuated with slogans (“The system is rigged!”) that could be coming from both the left and right in today’s angry, un-moneyed U.S. electorate.

Foster is too busy tossing mud and her camera around to seriously ask why (or even if) a blue-collar bud like Budwell would foolishly blow everything he has on a stock-market whim. Those are the sort of questions she simply runs over, content to feed us clichéd lines like those printed on Gates’ cue cards or whispered in his earpiece by his all-knowing, all-seeing producer. No, it’s enough for us to get that Gates is a boorish show-biz charlatan and behind him lurks an even bigger, villainous one—the uber-greedy CEO (Dominic West) of a shadowy finance company that suspiciously lost $800 million in stock value overnight. This guy isn’t just a capitalist pig but a chauvinist one to boot, treating his leggy staffer and mistress (Caitriona Balfe) with oily “That’s my girl” patriarchal condescension.

Foster wears her gender politics on her rolled-up left sleeve, bluntly separating not the men from the boys, but her sharp, ultra-capable females from their obvious lessers—their clueless, often-monstrous male counterparts. Not only does Roberts serve as Foster’s quietly heroic center, she’s the real power behind Gates’ chintzy Dow Jones throne, feeding him lines and keeping him and everyone else cool under crisis pressure. Her partner in distaff kickass-ness is that model-thin staffer, who instantly evolves from corporate mouthpiece and concubine into crusading detective faster you can say Erin Brockovich, digging up the dirt on her boss’ shady globe-trotting missions in his private jet. Back at the studio, the New York City SWAT cops called to the scene recklessly reach for their guns and insults first; it’s no surprise the only exception is a lowly (black) policewoman whom Foster calls to duty only to blow the whistle on her trigger-happy blue crew.

Hollywood insiders might think that with Foster, Clooney & Roberts in charge, Money Monster would be too big to fail. But that’s what they said about Enron, AIG , Lehman Brothers and Johnny Depp’s Lone Ranger.

In other words, don’t bet on a box-office bail-out. My money is on audiences bailing out.

5/14/16

The 84th Academy Awards -- 2012

Midnight in Hollywood

by Thomas Delapa


And now, the envelope please for the best morning-after Oscar lead: Silent Night ... Silence Was Golden ... Let’s Hear it for The Artist. ... For Hugo, it was a basic Paint It Black.

Zut alors! The Artist, a loving Franco-American tribute to silent cinema, spoke the loudest at the 84th Academy Awards, winning gold in five categories, including Best Director and Best Picture. There were few surprises in Hollywood’s genial, but generally lackluster annual tribute to itself. The biggest winner might have been the worldwide audience, which at least didn’t have to endure a return performance from last year’s tinny Gen-X teaming of James Franco and Anne Hathaway.

Meryl Streep may have pulled off a small upset for her victory as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, besting Viola Davis in The Help, and Streep might have even won over the crowd for her disarming acceptance speech. “Streep fatigue”? After a record 17 nominations and three wins, you bet. Hollywood’s reigning grande dame (at the age of 62), Streep has steeped into the Starbucks of the movies—omnipresent, rich and creamy, and not without a bitter aftertaste.

Nostalgia, not Grease, was the word the long night, starting with Billy Crystal’s ninth role as host. Crystal was drafted when Eddie Murphy bowed out in allegiance to foot-in-mouth producer Brett Ratner, whose salacious and homophobic remarks last November got him the boot. In the 3-hour-plus event, Hollywood preferred to look back, not forward, focusing on its glittery past rather than its uncertain future in the age of thinning audiences and the multi-media challenges to its dominance—not unlike its slow fade in the made-for-TV 1950s.

With box-office attendance down significantly in 2011, the studios continue to bet on overstuffed technology and novelty, not talent, especially 3-D. Even New (now Old) Hollywood film purists Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg joined the 3-D parade in 2011, though not with big hits. While the $150 million-plus Hugo did grab the lion’s share of technical Oscars, it barely meowed in the major categories, which won’t much help its so far one-dimensional ticket sales.

In Hollywood’s own backyard at the sponsor-less (nee Kodak) theater, The Artist was masterful, leaving most American nominees French-fried and tongue-tied. Best Director Michel Hazanavicius thanked the late, great Billy Wilder three times, while gushing Best Actor Jean Dujardin said he loved our country and gave a shout-out to Douglas Fairbanks, one of his models for his role as silent star George Valentin. Among the hunky also-rans, George Clooney had to be content with statuesque supermodel Stacy Kiebler on his arm, while Brad Pitt seemed satisfied to be clutching Angelina Jolie, whose slit gown (and vampy podium pose) tied her with a full-breasted Jennifer Lopez for best (un)dressed star.

While Billy Crystal did yeoman’s work in a substitute lead role, ringing in with a few zingers ("Nothing can take the sting out of world economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with gold statues"), his schtick seemed a déjà vu rewind, sort of like the Oscars as whole. The Artist became the first silent movie since 1927-28 (and Wings) to win for Best Picture. The fact that a low-budget, nearly wordless, black-and-white movie stomped its well-heeled competition speaks volumes about how much loud, mainstream Hollywood has lost its way, if not its voice.

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2/27/12

Film Review | The Descendants

A-Low-Ha

by Thomas Delapa


After such critically acclaimed hits as Sideways and About Schmidt, you’d think that director Alexander Payne would have nowhere to go but up. But success can be a slippery slope in Hollywood. Even with hunky George Clooney out front and sunny Hawaii in the background, The Descendants is a balmy downer.

Call it Melancholia in Paradise, with Sir George playing Matt King, a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis. With his wife comatose in the hospital after a freak boating accident, Matt is morosely adrift, especially when it comes to handling his two troubled daughters. “I’m the backup parent,” he ruefully admits in his narration, a declaration that becomes obvious as watch his bewilderment faced with young Scottie (Amara Miller), whether acting out in grade school, or teenage Alex (Shailene Woodley), who curses—and drinks—like a sailor.

Based on a book by Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants has risen dramatically in critics’ 2011 Top Ten lists, though I’m as bewildered as Clooney’s rather dull and doltish character is. Unless your idea of comedy is watching Clooney wildly run around Hawaii in sandals (imagine a pineapple balancing on his head), I’d say that old Hawaii Five-0 re-runs have more juice.

Payne does his own balancing act, erratically mixing low-grade laughs (aren’t bratty kids so funny when they swear?) with a dead-serious plot that digs into both mortality and infidelity. Not only does Matt’s wife lay stricken and comatose in a hospital bed, but he’s apparently the last one to know that she has been unfaithful to him. Out of this stiff contrivance arises our hero's madcap adventure to track down and confront his rival.

After last year’s turn as a stoic, coldblooded assassin in The American, Clooney goes to the humid extremes, wearing a dewy-eyed guise of bitter and hapless vulnerability. Payne’s camera comes in for so many close-ups of actors tearing up, I thought I was watching a Kleenex commercial.

The director’s once-reliable gifts for irony and satire seemed to have dried up, replaced by clammy sentimentality. As his wife’s health goes downhill, Matt must face the ultimate choice of pulling the plug.

During the crisis, he must also deal with the business of selling his extended family’s lush swath of virgin land on neighboring Kauai. Passed down from his mixed-race ancestors, 19th century settlers of Hawaii, the land is certain to net the clan a king’s ransom.

Other than as vehicle for Clooney to show off his warm side and great tan decked out in floral shirts, Payne’s pallid film seems content to pose the star against a series of scenic Hawaii locations, accompanied by banal island music that seems better fit for a luau. Even though dysfunctional families are still alive and functional in Hollywood, this is one family tree that’s full of sap.

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12/15/11

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

Bona Fide Funny

by Thomas Delapa


How to describe O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen brothers' latest wild and wooly film fantasy? Ostensibly based on Homer's Odyssey, it attempts to do for the deep South what Fargo did for the upper Midwest, only in a far lighter vein. It may be the only movie to combine Greek myth, bluegrass music, a biblical flood and a Ku Klux Klan rally.

The gods must be smiling on the Coens, for somehow this wacky extravaganza works.

I may live to regret saying this, but I take back almost everything I've said about George Clooney's acting abilities. Discarding his stolid, tough-guy roles, Clooney dusts off a bright, charming comic personality to go along with his matinee-idol good looks.

Clooney plays Ulysses Everett McGill, one of three prisoners who escape a Mississippi chain gang during the Depression 1930s. With him are his dim, down-home cohorts, Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) and Pete (the wild-eyed John Turturro). As incentive to escape, Everett promises the other two a share of the million dollars he's hidden away from a robbery.

After the Odyssey, the brothers Joel and Ethan take the idea of a husband trekking home to claim his wife after years away. But the Coens also borrow from Sullivan's Travels, Preston Sturges' 1942 screwball comedy which told of a Hollywood director who hobnobs as a hobo to research his upcoming human-interest drama called Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

You don't need to know Greek to enjoy the misadventures of this trio. Blessed with the gift of pedantic gab, Everett is a cheery optimist who's obsessive about his brand--Dapper Dan--of hair gel. When it comes to winning back the wife (Holly Hunter) who's disowned him, he insists, "But I'm the pater familias" in a manner that suggests Bugs Bunny crossed with Clark Gable.

Clooney's ably supported by Nelson and Turturro as his partners in grime and ex-crime. The dumbest of the bunch, Delmar postulates that Pete was turned into a toad during a close encounter with a threesome of sultry sirens along a riverbank.

Along with Roger Deakins' glowing, golden-hued cinematography is a toe-tapping sprinkling of old folk favorites as the score. Once the boys wander in to a recording studio and serendipitously sing "Man of Constant Sorrow" accompanied a black guitar player (Chris Thomas King), unknown to them they become a sensation on the airwaves. Toward the end, they get to reprise their hit in rambunctious hootenanny wearing false beards.

O Brother might have been better had it ended with its gleeful musical finale. Instead, the Coens bother to add on a deus ex machina flood that washes away some of the buoyant momentum.

Nonetheless, after the big letdown of The Big Lebowski, the Coens are back on top in this terrifically odd but uplifting Depression odyssey.

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 1-18-01

Film review | The American

Born in the USA

by Thomas Delapa


George Clooney isn’t just a bona fide movie star. He may be the last American matinee idol. In a time when most U.S. leading men are either fading (Jack Nicholson), aging (Al Pacino), strange (Mel Gibson), selective (Tom Hanks) or forever adolescent (Tom Cruise), Clooney still shines with the kind of looks and charisma that hark back to old Hollywood.

But King George is also reluctant movie royalty. Apart from his lucrative roles in the leaky Ocean’s Eleven franchise, he prefers to swim upstream in risky, offbeat and independent films. For a heartthrob, he’s a wallflower when it comes to old-school romance. To this critic, there’s no question his most likable performance was as a conniving convict in the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Likable is likely the last word you’d use to describe Clooney’s role in The American, a stark, Europeanized thriller that’s as far from Hollywood as Tuscany is from Tuscaloosa. Just to get our attention that this isn’t your father’s George Clooney, in the first scene he shoots a woman in the back.

In a role that only the NRA could love, Clooney’s Jack is an itinerant underground arms dealer who specializes in custom-built guns. He works alone, travels alone and—mostly—sleeps alone. His only contact is a chilly superior (Johan Leysen) who warns him to, above all, “don’t make any friends.” Ambushed in Sweden, Jack hightails it to Italy, where he goes on the lam in the harsh (and earthquake-prone) mountainous region of Abruzzi.

If Clooney’s vehicle is of a peculiar anti-commercial caliber, it also isn’t especially original. It’s loaded with homages that recoil with imagery from cinema’s minimalist past, from Fred Zinnemann’s fine The Day of the Jackal to Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s famed existentialist dramas, such as 1975’s The Passenger.

In their adaptation of Martin Booth’s 1990 novel (A Very Private Gentleman), director Anton Corbijn and screenwriter Rowan Joffe seem to want to ascend to the lofty peaks of allegory. Jack isn’t simply an American, but the American–in the oft-quoted words of D.H. Lawrence, “hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.” Clooney is all those things, and less. We know nothing about him, other than he has a butterfly tattoo on his back, is bravura in bed, and is equally adept breaking a man’s neck with James Bondian license-to-kill authority.

For the other dramatic details, we’re supposed to read between the lines. The trouble is, those lines are as meandering as the curves on the prostitute that Jack shacks up with in the small town. For all the chaste anti-commercialism that the movie shoots for, Clara (Violante Placido) is the sort of happy Italian hooker that only Hollywood could dream of: sweet, young, voluptuous and ripe for the taking.

In Jack’s daytime hours, he gets busy filling a custom rifle order for Mathilde (Thekla Reuten), an alluring assassin and master of disguise who looks like she belongs on Goldfinger’s payroll. As Jack works methodically to assemble the gun and its special silencer in secret, Corbijn packs these scenes with minimalist pop, crafting a statement on the torrid longstanding love affair between firearms and the man.

Elsewhere, Corbijn and his cinematographer put Jack in the crosshairs, positioning him alone in composed long shots that underline his isolation, if not desolation. Despite the warning, Jack tentatively befriends a wise local priest (Paolo Bonacelli), who refutes Jack’s naive Americanized notion that he can “escape history.”

If Jack is aimed to be the violent, allegorically ugly, American, neither can Clooney escape his fateful inability to express his character through an arsenal of long silences, blank stares and airless ennui. I’ll grant that Corbijn’s nifty twist finale finds its target, but otherwise The American is more miss than hit.

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Originally published in Conducive Chronicle, 9/8/10

Film Review | Up in the Air

Ups and Downs

by Thomas Delapa

Meet Ryan Bingham (George Clooney). He’s a professional terminator. No relation to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bingham jets around the U.S. methodically firing employees at the behest of their craven employers. Suave and impersonal, Bingham loves his job. And in today’s Great Recession, he’s never short of good work.

An undercapitalized satire of corporate downsizing, Up in the Air is tough and lofty on the outside, soft and squishy on the inside. You keep hoping for a first-class social comedy out of director Jason Reitman, but he settles for coach.

There’s nothing awry with Reitman’s opening takeoff on Walter Kirn’s 2002 novel. Under the credits, we’re serenaded with a pop version of Woody Guthrie’s populist “This Land is Your Land” as we see sky-high views of cities across the U.S. Back on Earth, Ryan’s boss (Jason Bateman) gloats, “This is one of the worst times for America ...This is our moment.” For a company that specializes in doing the dirty business of business, happy days are here again.

As Bingham, Clooney is a pin-sharp hatchet man in suit and tie. Bingham not only relishes his job, but loves his nonstop rootless existence. A moonlighting motivational speaker, “Moving is living” is his slogan. He’s no more at home than he is on the road, a chilly-blue blur of airports, motor hotels and rental cars. His sublime goal in life is neither family nor fame; instead he’s aiming to be only the seventh person to ascend to 10 million frequent-flyer miles.

When playing it slick and confident, Clooney stays on course—and so does Reitman. In quick documentary-like montages, Bingham coolly dismisses a parade of devastated employees, many asking him in parting, “How do you live with yourself?” In an age where corporate-worker loyalty has gone the way of the adding machine, employees can be downsized, outsourced and red-slipped in a stock tick, even while inept Wall Street barons are bailed out with federally-stitched golden parachutes.

But Reitman (Juno) does his own bailing out, leaving audiences suspended mid-air while he comically humanizes Bingham and company. Heady after another round of firings, Bingham is called back to his Omaha headquarters and teamed with Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a fresh-faced “efficiency expert” who thinks his face-to-face methods are obsolete. While superficially a hard egg, Natalie is just a soft-boiled romantic under her shell. Inefficiently cast as Bingham’s conscience, Kendrick shrinks on the screen, coming off as high-heeled Munchkin, not steely corporate henchman.

By dwelling on Ryan’s and Natalie’s petty troubles, Reitman downsizes the satire to practically nothing. During one of his last trips, Bingham takes a detour to mid-America Wisconsin for his sister’s wedding, taking along Alex (Vera Farmiga), seemingly his ideal merger partner in libido and credit cards. Up in Wisconsin, Up in the Air takes another nose dive, landing in an exquisitely (and unironically) banal wedding party that is meant to teach Bingham the glories of homespun family life. Taken together, Clooney—one of Hollywood’s most stratospheric men—and this bunch is a cheesy, airsick-inducing combination of Brie and Velveeta.

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